Wednesday 6 November 2024

Plodding on

 No sign that the antibiotics are kicking in yet and I'm half way through the course.  I can see myself back down the Dr's tomorrow morning. Anyway, I have felt very slightly better - better enough to tackle the boxes of old stock tucked away and decide what will go.  I have even put 3 big boxes in the car, along with the spare table and both the big display shelves.  I put the final stitches in the big auction quilt last night and now it's in the washing machine.  I will take both the single hexi quilts too.


The patchwork tops are generous - unlike some which have a patchwork bit barely the width of the top of the bed and a huge valance drop to them.   With these you could if you wished take off the valance edge.

I've popped down the town to post the teacosy to Danette (enjoy it my dear), and had some venison steaks put on one side at the Butchers for Keith's birthday meal on Saturday, and had an early lunch of a small bowl (half a tin) of Oxtail soup and the last muffin, buttered, and will take myself off to the sofa shortly to rest up.

I had a good mix of tv yesterday - episode 8 of Rivals last night; several of Dave's Countryside Walks on Youtube, where he roams parts of Dorset and the New Forest very familiar and comforting to me with his Whippet Logan; Kate and the Last Homely House; a couple of archaeology programmes and a Who Do You Think You Are.

This morning I've been researching Berber doors and found that mine is called a Jajouj door.  Apparently they are believed to have the power to ward off evil spirits, and protect from bad luck and misfortune.  They can also bring good luck and fortune.  Mine will be much cheaper than the examples I've found on line, some of which are well into four figures!


Tuesday 5 November 2024

Laid up with a UTI

 Just what I didn't need - although the timing could have been a lot worse, had it happened next weekend.  Started feeling rough yesterday, had a very bad night and managed to get a GP appt. 9.30 this morning, thank heavens.  I've been put on MacroBID - Nitrofurantoin - which has some scary side effects.  I always read the sheet that comes with medications, and just as well I did with this one as it comes with contra-indications that it can affect breathing, so I spoke to the pharmacist before taking the first one.  It makes you drowsy too, so I have been zzzzzzzzing on the sofa, with Kate at the Last Homely House on to keep me company.  I am very glad that I have made good progress with prepping everything for the Fair, and now even have two of the big burgundy sheets I use to cover the tables at the Fair, washed and drying.



Danette - photos of the pretty patchwork tea cosy for you.  Brain too addled to start working out how I add them to a WhatsApp message!


Here is the Berber (Moroccan) door, which I gave a little tlc yesterday




I just love the designs on it - especially the compass drawn one which turns up in British folk designs too, and early furniture.  I read somewhere that these were the locked doors for jewellery and things which needed to be kept safe.  


You can't see the copper colour properly but this was black when it came home.  It is a coffee dallah with wonderful Indo Persian designs chased into it.


A not very sharp photo of the Chinese dragons - these would have been hung in homes I believe.  Hope someone will fall in love with some of these goodies anyway.  


Back to the sofa now.


Monday 4 November 2024

Definitely NOT a car boot sale!

 


Debby said that it sounded like a lot of preparation for that car boot sale.  Believe me, if it were a car boot sale, it would be a bung it in the back job the afternoon before.  No, my Fair next weekend is this one and I am in the Dome (right hand side of the photo above).  Keith and I used to have a pillar to pillar (triple) stand in the Dome, right next to the lovely couple who used to sell the copper and brass pictured above.  I think they retired just before the first Lockdown, so good timing for them.  This time I have a single pitch, but also have a portion of one of the nearby glass doored entrance halls into the Dome, which is planted with amazing shrubs and plants from all around the world and which thrive inside the Dome.  This gets VERY hot in the summer and pretty chilly in the winter.  Next weekend calls for Winter Woollies!  I am being very specific with what I am taking and will even have a mock set up on my big kitchen table before I go to see that I have the look I want.  I need to strike the right balance with my display.  Some of the French brocante style stalls look like they have been professionally curated by window dressers and I can't compete - having totally different stock anyway.  I specialize in the unusual - sometimes bizarre - pieces.  Who else will have a bronze Indian temple "toy" in the form of a lion with the head of a man, which is meant to represent the Belgian king and Congo dictator Leopold II.  Not a strong selling point since he was responsible for the rape, mutilation and genocide of millions of Congoese people.  It's "old stock" (I have an awful lot of that, hence still doing Fairs!!)  Keith was with me when I had picked it up just to LOOK at it, and ask the price, and the next moment he had bought it (paying far too much).  So I am stuck with it . . .  I shall have to play down the Leopold II bit . . . or not mention him at all.  

I will take quilts and a Welsh blanket, small pieces of furniture including the lovely Smoker's Bow which has been professionally re-caned and looks fabulous (and it is SO rare).  A gorgeous inlaid round-topped wine table with a bobbin-turned stand.  A lovely little tiny-hexagons tea-cosy cover, huge wooden Welsh cawl spoons, an old ship's lamp or two, the big Turkish dough boards, and some pretty Studio Pottery ceramics. Some old lace, and those gorgeous Chinese and Burmese wooden pieces.  Plus paintings and prints.  A bit of everything.  I will look through Keith's militaria and see what I may be able to fit in on part of the table.  I'll try and add some photos later.

Sunday 3 November 2024

Just when I need some energy . . .

The view from my bathroom window, across the fields to Llanelwedd quarry down the other side of town.  Proof that the sun does shine here sometimes!


. . . . there is none to be found.  I slept badly again last night - that blasted Alfie again - and I think I need a few nights with cats downstairs since I have the Fair to prepare for.  That's what I spent much of yesterday doing.  I polished the little Georgian scratch-made child's chair up, and did lots of research on the more exotic things I got at the last Fair  at Malvern, but can find NOTHING like them, anywhere.  So valuing will be difficult and the jury is still out on that.  I polished up a little wooden inkwell from the 1920s that has a little Jack Russell type dog cut-out on the top.  I never knew that the His Master's Voice dog logo dated from 1899.  This little dog is very similar.  I went out to the stables and emptied a half-full deep plastic storage box so I can fill it with Fair things, non-ceramic.  I labelled and priced a few items.  In the evening I was hand-quilting the biggest of the 3 quilts from that last auction until Pippi decided she wanted to sleep inside the portion that drooped down towards the floor and after that I couldn't pull it up to work on it for fear of disturbing her.  I know . . . Mrs Softee.

I saw on Facebook this week that my favourite author, Phil Rickman, had died.  He had a bad stroke a few years ago, so I wonder if it was another one that did for him.  There is one last book of his in the pipeline (though not due to be issued for a year).  I have pre-ordered it on Amazon for my Kindle.

I was up very late this morning, and drove to Llandod as I had decided to get the week's grocery shopping out of the way.  I did a Big Shop (just over  £100! EEK!), as several things I use were on offer so worth buying two or three of, and when I looked at my trolley towards the end, there was just ONE meal in it, so it was off to the meat and freezer sections (I bought mostly fish), which I managed to squeeze in my freezers by taking some remaining veggie food of E's and taking it out of the large cardboard cartons to put in small freezer bags with the cooking instructions.  

Another £35 was spent topping the car up with diesel as I have 3 trips to and fro from Carmarthen next Friday to Sunday.

Now I'm going to have a lie down to find some energy for more Fair stock sorting later.  I want it all decided on, boxed and labelled by the end of tomorrow. 

Friday 1 November 2024

Some Welsh history, especially the Epynt clearances

 I slept badly last night - Alfie came in at 1 a.m. to be let out and that was me for several hours.  I've had to kip on the sofa at lunchtime and have been re-watching The Last Kingdom (how Keith and I enjoyed that series) on Netflix, and idly looking up various Welsh history leads at the National Library of Wales.



Here's what I bought at the Garden Centre.  I need to clean out a couple of planters and put fresh compost in the top and get these bulbs in. 


I kept away from plastic baubles (pretty though they were) and the owl, the mouse and the little Rosie decoration are a delight.


Last night's perusals on line bring you an extract from an old Welsh antiquarian journal dated August 10th 1804:  It was about the baptising of the g.g. grand-daughter (Ann Thomas), whose g.g. granny was Elizabeth Thomas, of Bettws, who was aged 99 years.  She was blind in one eye but could still knit, spin and sew without glasses, and she often walked 5 - 8 miles daily.  Her living children numbered 7, and she had 30 grandsons and nearly 100 g. grandsons . . .  Gosh, that certainly overwhelmed the gene pool in Bettws (near Newport) a bit!

I was reading about Conjuror Harries of Cwrt-y-Cadno, about whom I wrote a good few years ago after the library book about the Epynt clearances, mentioned him again in the finding of a murderer after a woman's body - that of Peggy Fach of Ffrydiau was found in a bog.  Her lover Jack (of Troed-rhiw-derwyddon) had killed her and buried her body there. Apparently Harries was instrumental in the finding of this body too, so solving yet another murder mystery.  Few local people would pass Cymdyfnant,  where the bog was, after dark.  In Herbert Hughes' book "An Uprooted Community - a History of Epynt" also mentions a bird photographer who would go there to take photos of the Ravens in the area.



The Epynt book is a very interesting read but you cannot help but feel distressed still for the people who lost the farms and smallholdings which had been their homes for generations, in some cases since Elizabethan times.  As at Tyneham village (near Swanage) in Dorset, the MoD laid claim to the land (36,000 acres) as an Army training area and their representative visited every farm, giving a date for the evictions.  No consideration was given that it might had been right in the middle of lambing, and the same price was paid for good acreage as for neglected sour rushy hill grazing, which upset people too, being so unfair.  

Slightly better grazing in this photo.

It was a hard life up there - you have seen some of the photos I've used in my blog since we've moved here.  It is what is known as marginal land - somewhere only just possible to scrape a living.  Sheep are about the only livestock that paid, and only the older unimproved types of cereal - red wheat and grey oats - could cope with the poor acidic soil and the rainfall. Back in those times there were no tight elastic bands to put around the ram lambs' testicles until they atrophied - indeed, one man claimed to have castrated thousands of 4 - 6 week old lambs using his TEETH!!  They would even make a ewe's milk cheese, thus utilising another aspect of sheep keeping.  It would be mixed one gallon of ewes' milk to a (separated - cream for butter) single cow's milking and would be sold at market after 6 mths or so of it curing.  Butter was made weekly and baskets of eggs also taken to the mart.  Any left over butter would be salted and put in a crock and taken back in during winter months when a premium price could be achieved.  Obviously in the summer there would be a glut of butter as all the cows had calved close together.  

Peat was used for burning, and there were three types (qualities) of peat, and a peat fire was never allowed to go out. One old dear was known for burning "cled" -  "the firm stuff" - in other words, cow pats she had dried and saved!  The author reports that once some old swords had been found in the depths of a peat bog.  Iron Age perhaps.  Coal had to be bought and was burnt with the peat.  Bargoed coal (where my grandfather was a miner) was the favourite. The fine coal would be made into "pele" by mixing it with local clay to make it burn longer.  In some farms the fireplace was on the actual floor and burned well there.  In areas where there were oak trees, these would have the bark stripped from them before felling and the bark transferred to the tannery in old canvases.

Food was probably fairly repetitive - there were three types of gruel ("sucan") which was eaten at breakfast.  One was water mixed with inferior flour, which then stood for a week to a fortnight to settle, then mixed and a portion put into a pan over the fire and drank as if it were hot milk.  The second was boiled and stirred until it thickened, like jelly and a portion of this eaten with milk. The third type was made like a thick porridge and poured into basins.  Pancakes were made with buttermilk and this was far nicer than using milk.  Bread, butter and cheese were eaten for tea.

Cawl - soup - was the lunchtime staple of the daily diet and made with scraps of beef, and root vegetables.  A cow would be killed in the autumn - a community barren cow of some 4 or 5 years old - would be killed, bled and then suspended from a beam and sawn up into portions.  Entrails weren't used and liver was the prerequisite of the man who had butchered it.  The rumen (stomach) was washed, covered in hot lime for a few days and then washed again and the inside peeled off and the outside (tripe) put in salt water until clean and then cooked.  Any fat made tallow for candle-making and the butcher would have the skin. The lower legs were boiled down to produce an oil used to treat stiffness.

I will end with quoting from the book.  The family of one farmstead were moving out at the end of June - shelling was to commence on 1st July

 "An old lady of 82 sat on an old chair she had dragged out to the furthest end of the yard, and was sitting there, motionless, gazing towards the mountain with tears streaming down her cheeks.  She had been born there, and her father and grandfather before her.  She is leaving today and she is distilling into these last few minutes one last enriching view of the ancient mountain or recalling her lifespan in the old cottage.  I don't know, I could only see the tears of her anguish."  This was written by Iowerth C Peate, who created St Fagans, the Welsh Folk Museum in Cardiff.

Garden Centre fun


Well, I've seen it all now - a RODENT Christmas Tree! It made me smile, I have to say!  Who on earth thought up that RATS would be something you dressed your Christmas tree with?


This was a little Christmas scenario - a cross between Holland (Windmills) and Switzerland - cable cars and snow!  Nothing like as good as the splendid one they have in Charlies in Carmarthen though.



I always love the look of these Christmas dried fruit and frosted pine cones but am too mean to pay £10.99 for some (or MORE).  I have a dehydrator so could make my own, but first I would have to find the dehydrator!  Sorry, photo below not a brilliant one.



Thousands of different decorations.



Lots of different coloured themes.  There was even one stand bedecked with pigs, cows, sheep, tractors and other farming themed decorations! (See above).





Hedgehogs too . . .





All sorts of different trees and ideas to decorate them.  We of course stay with the traditional tree from the wild woods.

Needless to say with all the flashing lights, and different colours, Rosie was on sensory overload for a bit!
 


How cute is this little chap?

I will do some outside photos and what I bought later.  There were some trees there with staggering prices - one enormous olive tree in a planter had been reduced - from £999 down to £899.  Bound to fly out now!  A 6 foot or so Acer in a pot - £349!  Huge planters big enough to hide a body in, £349.  I bought just two lots of bulbs as they are expensive there and so I bought things I wouldn't necessarily find elsewhere.

I have been having no end of techy problems. The printer (an HP, drat it) has suddenly refused to let me use the cheaper alternative to its own printer ink (which would cost me £40 + instead of the £12 I've been paying.  I had just bought some replacement ones and it doesn't want to know and won't even print black any more.  Now, do I buy another cheap printer complete with ink (probably a Canon) or do I give in and buy expensive ink for a printer which is otherwise working but calls for the dear stuff?  I can get the Canon with own ink for the same price as the HP ink . . .  Canon come with not very good write-ups reference about setting up on the computer.

I was up in the middle of the night, trying to get yesterday's photos off my phone.  It decided it wanted to load up everything on there again and then I was out of storage space and the only way to put more photos on and access fresh emails was to bite the bullet and pay Microsoft £1.99 a month for extra storage.  THEN I couldn't find the photos.  I could see them on a Pictures page but couldn't find the link for it.  Finally this morning I have accessed them on a fresh Photos link which I used for my blog.  I still don't know where they are otherwise and of course my chief technician has gone home now!

So with the printer (also a scanner) playing up I couldn't scan documents to send to the Bank to have Keith's current account balance transferred to mine, and will have to go down to the PO in a minute to post them, recorded delivery.

I gave up on the lovely but challenging Medieval banquet 1000 piece jigsaw.  Life is too short and I hadn't touched it for a fortnight.  Instead I sat down yesterday and found the edge pieces for the 500 piece Summer Cottage.  

I have been offered a space next weekend (single table) at the Antiques Fair Keith and I used to do.  I have a little overspill area where I can put some small pieces of furniture but need to get myself organized over what I am taking, and give a little Georgian child's chair a good polish today.  I want to sort out what is going and have it all in a couple of boxes.  It unfortunately clashes with what would have been Keith's 84th Birthday, and the children are all going to be here for that and cook venison.  I nearly said no I can't do it but I heard Keith's voice telling me not to be so silly.


  

Thursday 31 October 2024

Sniff

 


I don't often repost memes - in fact, I think this may be a first.  Anyway, sadly the above states a fact.

You may remember that I suddenly lost my sense of smell, and this was about 6 mths ago.  I put it down to a sinus cold I had which had me blowing my nose for 6 weeks and I thought I must have damaged the mucous membrane in my nose.  Well, last night it suddenly returned.  Before that I couldn't smell TCP, onion, curry, vinegar - nothing strong!  I really missed the scent of my roses this summer.  Having checked out Dr Google this morning, apparently stress can affect your olafactory senses - it works in the brain rather than directly in the nostrils.  Strange.  Well, I have certainly been incredibly stressed in the last year that's for sure.

Having Tam and Rosie here for a couple of nights/3 days a week makes a huge difference to me.  Of course, when she's back at work I won't see so much of them but at the moment they are a huge support and Rosie is such a delight.


Gabby came up for lunch yesterday and bought some tasty goodies - Parmesan & Garlic Twists, Bistro Runny Egg Scotch Eggs for her and Tam  (YUK!), tasty spicy Chicken Tikka Pakoras, and I had baked bread, plus there was a cheese board and salad. 

After lunch we started planning our trip to NZ.  I am still waiting for the NZ book from the Library.  The direct flight is a whole day and night so we are going to stop on the way - probably Vancouver for a couple of nights, and possibly San Francisco on the way back.  I have told Gabby I am going to give all my clothes to the nearest thrift store in San Francisco and find a quilt shop and buy more fabric for my stash!!

I set to first thing and baked a Spicy Dorset Apple cake for the friends who supply me with windfall apples, and then a huge Chocolate Gingerbread cake, some of which is going home with Tam and the rest in the freezer. 

Tam's just made me laugh - I heard her laughing up there and apparently the moment she opened the bedroom door, Lulu fell in.  She LOVES little ones (remember she was always with "I" when they lived here).  She loves Rosie now and just wants to be by her.  I can hear Rosie's delighted "aat" (with a sort of silent t!!)

This morning we're going to nip across to the Garden Centre for bulbs and to look at their Christmas decorations and buy that one new special one we buy each year.  

I had a wonderful surprise in the post yesterday when a copy of Country Living magazine arrived on the doorstop (a magazine I love but rarely buy).  It was from my dear friend Danette and when I emailed her to say thankyou, she said she had bought me a year's subscription because I'd been having such a sh*t time of things lately.  Oh bless her.  What would I do without such wonderful friends.

I also got the hang of WhatsApp this week and had video calls with Little Lin and then Rosie (my dear friend in NZ).  Amazing. The video link on my computer no longer works so it's good to be in touch on my phone.

I have been summoned to do my bit keeping Rosie company whilst Tam gets dressed and cleans her teefs.  Offs I go . . .